It was the time when we used to go to Rome by train in the sleeping car, and the trip lasted the entire night. If one really wanted to fly, DC4s were available. The Constellations were only transcontinental. It was also the early time of TV advertisements. Having the RAI [Radio Audizioni Italiane, a public institution] opened the door to the Caroselli*. Production companies pushed up like mushrooms in Milan, and the producers from Rome used to come to Milan (by sleeping car) to show short movies to advertising companies and customers.

The productive part of the country was in Northern Italy, that’s well know. Customers and advertising agencies used to invite Roman producers of advertising movies to Milano. And yet an incredible quantity of work was enabled in Milan because of the RAI decision to introduce an advertising program: of course they were movies, although short. In a city where movie-making was slow and only focused on some parts of the movies produced in Rome, it didn’t take much time to put in sound stages, recording and dubbing studios, development and printing. Sound technicians, boom operators, directors of photography, electricians, were suddenly called to work.

It happened that an agency of film processing, printing and sound mixing, born in the immediate after war, realizing the equipment was inadequate, signed an agreement with FONO ROMA for the management of the audio department in Milan. It was a necessary decision to improve the sound quality. At stake was the cost of broadcasting Caroselli, so high that bad sound quality wasn’t acceptable.
After seven years of tough training at the FONO ROMA in Rome, I appeared to be suitable for leading the Roman management of the Milanese studio. That’s a fact from which a very long story could arise not quite influential about Thelonious Monk concert in Milan.

It was the very first concert by Thelonious Monk in Italy, April 21 1961, at Teatro Lirico in Milan, a memorable event in history of jazz music.

My recording of this concert was due to two coincidences: the meeting with an American person, Blesser I believe, who wanted to sell an audio recorder, an AMPEX 350, before he went back to the U.S., and a different meeting, with Mario Fattori. Mario Fattori was a director and the head of one of most prestigious Milanese companies producing advertising movies. He was also a passionate supporter of jazz.
FONO ROMA purchased the AMPEX 350 portable recorder with three tracks, and a mixer with twelve inputs and four outputs -of course everything was tube- plus twelve SCHOEPS CM54 condenser microphones.
Mario Fattori was a FONO ROMA customer and the producer of the CONCERT. He asked me to record the exceptional event bringing to the Teatro Lirico the AMPEX in suitcases. It must be told that, at the time, magnetic recording on tape had already reached high quality levels, as in the CINEMASCOPE films of the early 50s. Nevertheless, to use a recorder with three tracks on half-inch tape, and portable, was a big advantage.

Such advantage forced me actually to face a conflict between two schools: the American and the European. In Rome, the capital of movie making in Italy, where I fed my professional skills, the American school prevailed, based on the CINEMASCOPE stereophonic structure: left, center and right, represented by three speaker behind the screen, hence the recording was on three tracks. In Milan instead, where the record companies prevailed, stereophony was on two tracks.

How to reconcile the conflict? It would have been inevitable to use only two tracks, implying only two microphones positioned for the “concert.” That was impossible due to the way the musicians were positioned, the lack of a boom and the need to have sounds in the foreground: the microphones in front of the instruments. How did I distribute the instruments on the tracks? Frankly, I don’t remember. Much more important is what happened in the second part of the concert. I don’t know what kind of agreement was there between musicians and producer, yet I clearly remember that the musicians, men of a certain stature and not only in a musical sense, were going round between the stage and the room where I had placed the equipment. They were very, very suspicious. So suspicious that, after the break, at the beginning of the second half of the concert with the curtains open, they moved the microphones before they started playing, rotating the stands in such a way that the sound could only be randomly grabbed I thought. Evidently, they knew what they were doing. Before I delivered the tape, I made a stereo-copy for my personal memory, that I never used. After such a long time, it could still contain something to tell us.

*Caroselli: every night at 9 pm, advertisements were a small theater with very short episodes. They were funny and well made. I grew up watching them before I was sent to sleep. I still remember the opening music. RA